The Awesome Things You're Missing Because of the Shutdown

Yep, the government is shut down. But while the politicians quibble over their differences, as usual it's the populace who suffers, and not just because we can't apply for a Small Business Association loan, buy a handgun, sign up for Medicare — an irony, considering Obamacare is open for business, and reportedly booming — or get audited by the IRS. There's a cultural impact that is being felt nationwide.

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Everyone by now has heard about the KKK rally that was canceled due to the closing of the Gettysburg National Military Park, and while the inability of cowardly, cowled hate groups to congregate on federal land is certainly a perk of this ineffectual nonsense in Washington, it may be the only one.

Some of the bigger shutdown casualties include:

NASA going dark. On their 55th birthday no less, which means that the Mars Rover has stopped tweeting and has caused a mass of supporters to take to Twitter with a variety of comments and thoughts, most of them entertaining, but sadly none of them doing much to advance the cause of science or alert us in the case of a fiery piece of space rock bent on total earth annhilation.

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All federally funded museums closed their doors. These include the Smithsonian, National Air and Space Museum, and, of course, the National Zoo, which means that, sorry folks, the panda cams have also gone offline, no doubt leading to a spike in YouTube kitten porn hits as frustrated voyeuristic animal lovers desperately seek a way to scratch the "oh, how cute!" itch. Elected officials still collecting their paychecks have deprived a bunch of eighth-graders who drove from Ohio for the chance to see all the cool stuff they spent countless hours raising $14,000 to see just to prove a political point.

National parks, all of 'em, have closed. Insofar as you can "close" 210,000 square miles of open space, that is. Sorry, were you planning on rafting the Colorado or climbing El Capitan? Tough luck. "Recreating will be prohibited," as Terry Selk, executive director of Yosemite National Park, so aptly put it in a letter on a local newspaper's website. On a local level, many events — weddings, concerts, Revolutionary War reenactments, fall foliage festivals, and more — have been called off or indefinitely postponed, as we watch and wait for the feds to work it all out. It's worth noting that while the government is shuttered over budget issues, last time this happened, in 1995/96, local businesses near national parks lost $14 milliona day for 28 days.

The Library of Congress, repository of, well, every damn piece of printed word just about ever, is locked up tight. And just to make things a little more irritating for those seeking the boundless knowledge contained within, its website is down, too. However, two of its component sites, THOMAS.gov and beta.congress.gov, which track legislation as it moves — or doesn't — through Congress, are live, proving that somewhere, deep in the recesses of the nearly 23 million books those hallowed halls contain, there sits a librarian with a sense of humor.

While there is endless spin and propaganda coming from both sides about blame and causality, perhaps the whole situation, and, indeed, the general culture of the officials we the people elected to office so they could, ostensibly, work for us, can best be summed up with a quote from this week's Breaking Bad finale, when Walter White turned to his wife and admitted: "I did it for me."